Is there a patch to fix CTD caused by the thief on 1-8?
Also really petty point, but the javelins have hand axe as their projectile animation
Edit: redownloaded link, 1-8 crash solved. Thanks Boss!
1 Like
See readme for the javelin issue
The javelins are obviously halberds and when you throw them the axe head comes off, but you keep the spear /end sarcasm
2 Likes
That really got a giggle out of me.
The Jank Saga continues
The newest release has clear flaws, not only related to the XNA transition’s bugs and jank, but preparation and gameplay. To start, it’s understandable that the port to XNA requires a lot of work and various bugs might pop up. However, the link has been updated multiple times already because of game-breaking issues. These aren’t rare occurrences but obvious mistakes throughout the whole game. One of these was in Chapter 1 to boot. Projects take time to prepare, but this was the day that was chosen for its release. If more time is needed then the result should be delayed, not rushed out for a deadline.
Going through the project as it is shows a lack of playtesting. Many maps feature recurring instances of enemies without weapons in addition to enemies with broken AI who ignore player units. There are plenty of features that have been added to the project but the core gameplay seems to have been somewhat overlooked as a result. Custom skills add a lot to units having different advantages but maps lack meaningful design to use them. For example, chapters like 1-10 and 1-11 feature large fields with little terrain and an abundance of enemies. These chapters have no anti-turtle incentive. Since there’s no reason to move it boils down to bait and switch gameplay. In addition, several waves of reinforcements appear late into the map. Reinforcements when used well push a player to adjust their strategy and think more strategically about the objective. However, these ones show up at the end of the map near the objective, simply adding more time wasted to bait them and move forward. They add nothing but tedium and annoyance. Chapters like these reward slow play. Their design features turtle-incentives, no anti.
Staff of Ages has a large team, a powerful engine and lots of potential. But the current release is rushed and it shows. With more time to weed out bugs and mistakes as well as a greater focus on the core gameplay rather than extra features, the project can be a lot better than how it is right now.
17 Likes
You make some good points and overall I think I agree but I just wanted to address a few things:
pointing out specifics here would help fix that issue, so I don’t have to comb through everything to find who’s missing weapon levels/weapons
the AI here is working as intended, if you mean in the fog map it’s because they can’t attack you unless they actually have vision, in non-fog maps the AI only will attack if the damage it takes isn’t way more than the damage they can deal to the target.
I’m hesitant to spend a lot of time right now fixing the gameplay aspects of Act 1, because we’ve spent so long on it I’m tired of working with it and want to work on newer content, it’s in the pipeline to be revised, I just don’t know when it’ll actually be done.
Barring any more unavoidable crashing issues, I’m estimating another release by the end of the week that will have a bunch of bug fixes based on what people report to me, so keep an eye open for that. Builds will also be re-versioned as 0.1.X so as not to have people think it’s a full game as it is still in need of work.
You can expect to see some things like weapon ranks actually being granted on promo and promo gains actually being what they should be, since that got overlooked.
Likely around that time I’ll put out a call for more testers as well, since there’s a lot to cover and a lot that gets overlooked unintentionally, but public releases always find more things we missed, so there may be merit in private and public betas (which is part of why the version number is changing so much).
2 Likes
Interesting on AI. I knew the fog rules were fairer for the player mechanically speaking, but how does it determine when it attacks or not?
Is there a threshold of damage given to taken that the enemy calculates before not attacking?
1 Like
I don’t know the exact numbers but yeah, there’s a threshold it checks if it reaches or not before it decides to attack.
Huh. I’m curious if there’s a way to manually set that threshold in XNA or if it makes sense to boost POW across the board on the enemy side so they don’t do that. But it depends on what you want out of the design. I feel like GBA enemies don’t ever behave like that, so I think it’ll throw a lot of players off when enemies charge them and sandbag by standing still.
2 Likes
In XNA the enemies see in the fog exactly as the player does, so the enemy team has a vision range of their own - you can even give them torches and thieves to improve their vision, and the player can kill them to gimp it. You can use flares, but they light up the map for both sides. It gives some interesting strategic choices for the player to make in FOW maps.
As for the damage threshold, I’m pretty sure you can set a large amount of AIs to each individual unit on a map. For example, you could say that bandits, monsters and mercenaries are dumber and will prioritize units closer to them / attack even if they deal 0 damage; on the flipside, you can set that the Royal Guard is very smart and will avoid attacking when they deal 0 damage, will do Rescue-Drop strats, trade items and vulneraries around when needed, gang up on single units or go straight for high priority targets etc. So there probably shouldn’t be much issue with that.
4 Likes
Bugs I found
General
Warrior promotion subtracts stats
Warriors have no bows
Charles’ paladin class has no animations and he just appears invisible
AI seems strangely indecisive, sometimes will just not attack units in range
Nimbus seems to have x2 effectiveness? Sawyer has 7 mag, Nimbus has 7 mt, 7 + (7*2) - 7 = 14?
1-4
These pillars are oddly colored
1-5
The boss’s death quote is the one from last chapter
1-9
This house is weird
The inn has one tile impassable for no particular reason
1-F
The Druid using the sleep staff crashes the game
(Possibly others, I couldn’t progress because of the Druid)
I don’t know if you care on a gameplay review but I can post one as well if so
6 Likes
Good news is most of those have been reported and are fixed or in the process of being fixed.
I’ll check out Nimbus, but I’m pretty sure it’s set up right already, the 1-3 shaman I’ll look into too, not sure if I accidentally made him a stronger variant or what.
For the AI:
If you want, I don’t know when we’ll get to touching up Act 1’s gameplay, but it’ll be a good reference for whenever it gets revisited.
Not specifically the fog chapter, other chapters as well. I remember distinctly in 1-11 the cav reinforcements would run up to Harold / Owen and then not attack, unfortunately not sure on how to replicate this specifically but Harold was on a forest if that helps?
yeah that’s still intended behavior based on how the AI is coded, they’re not meeting some threshold for damage dealt vs taken.
1 Like
To help keep track of issues that have already been reported, I threw together this spreadsheet based on what we already had internally.
I think that if the AI functions differently than how it would function in GBA, you may want to consider adjusting the map design to account for this since it may disrupt the flow of the map. (Like enemies not attacking when they would’ve in gba)
I haven’t played yet to say for myself, but if the behavior is confusing to the player it may be better to either better build around it or make an adjustment.
1 Like
I wouldn’t even know how to build around it because I can’t account for literally every possible thing the player could do without spending way longer than I want to on it, it’s just going to stay as is for now, we might adjust it later if we have enough time to play around with it.
1 Like
Yeah, makes sense. It’s a tricky thing to work around unless you make it blanket “the enemy always attacks if they have an opportunity to”.
I mean, all it takes is some replaying of chapters
I honestly think you’re overthinking how “difficult” this sort of thing is.